This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 31.9625° S, 141.4664° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
It sits on top of a miners' memorial, above one of the world's largest orebodies.
NSW Government puts it plainly: the Big Bench is on the Line of Lode Miners Memorial in Broken Hill, above the silver, lead and zinc that made fortunes in this remote outback city, and at two and a half times the size of a regular bench it makes anyone who sits on it look like a small child.
That siting gives an oversized bench a weight no other seat in this catalogue carries. The Line of Lode Memorial commemorates the more than eight hundred people who died working the Broken Hill mines – a number that reflects a century of underground work before safety regulation, and one the town has never treated lightly. Broken Hill's union history, and the eight-hour day and workplace protections that came out of it, are national history.
So the bench is not simply a photo prop. It is a place to sit on the hill above the mine, looking over the town, at a memorial.
The Line of Lode itself is extraordinary geology: a single continuous orebody running through the middle of a desert city, discovered in 1883, still being worked, and the reason BHP exists at all – the company took its name from this place.
Against the catalogue's other oversized seats – the Charleville and Withcott red chairs, the Winton deck chair, Igor's chair on Mount Dandenong – this is the only one where the joke of being made small carries something serious underneath it.
The bench's maker and installation date are not recorded here.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
